Character set

рф (Russian: Российская Федерация) is transliterated as Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, the Russian Federation. The domain has an ascii representation of xn--p1ai derived as Punycode for use in the Domain Name System.
The domain is intended for Internet resources with names in the Russian language using the Cyrillic alphabet.
A principles in the approval process of ICANN Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) states that Greek and Cyrillic two-character top-level domains should not exclusively use characters that could be confused with Latin characters of identical or similar shapes — a problem that particularly limits Cyrillic choices. As such, GNSO sought to avoid the direct transcription of "ru" into Cyrillic, "ру", and common abbreviations for Russia (Russian: Россия), such as "ро", in order to avoid confusion with the Latin ccTLDs .py ( Paraguay ) and .po (currently unassigned). In English sources .рф can be romanized as .rf, but the latter is not a valid domain for Russia.